Taser Wars: The Real Dangers of Loose Triggers

Iman Morales didn’t answer the door. As his mother stood waiting outside his one-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, she grew increasingly concerned. Lately Morales had been acting erratically and having trouble with his psychiatric medication. Desperation mounting, she called 911.

When the Emergency Service Unit from the New York City Police Department arrived, Morales scrambled out of his apartment onto the fire escape. The stout 35-year old was naked and shouted incoherently. An officer appeared on the fire escape, and Morales retreated to a slim metal ledge over a storefront, where he jabbed at him with a fluorescent light tube.

At that point, Lt. Michael Pigott, a 21-year NYPD veteran, ordered an officer on the ground to fire his stun gun. Morales collapsed and fell 10 feet to the sidewalk, landing on his head. He was taken to the hospital and pronounced dead on Sept. 24, 2008.

Morales’ death, a video of which was posted on the internet, raised a national media storm and fueled criticisms of law enforcement’s use of stun guns. During the past decade, police departments all over the United States have ramped up use of Tasers, the popular name for stun guns produced by Taser International. By June 2009, the company said it had sold Tasers to more than 14,200 law enforcement agencies in over 40 countries, and that 29 of the 33 largest U.S. cities now deploy the weapon.

According to Taser International, its technology is relatively safe — the official terminology is “less lethal”— and decreases injury and death among both police officers and arrestees. But not all experts agree. Doctors in particular are concerned about the effects on the heart and brain. And a December report by Amnesty International found that between 2001 and 2008, 334 people died in the U.S. after being Tasered by police. Just last month, a 19-year-old man died after being Tasered by police in San Bernardino, California.

“There is so much controversy because [the Taser] has conquered the market so rapidly,” said Steve Tuttle, vice president of communications for Taser International. “It’s a revolution in law enforcement. And with revolution comes pain.”

Taser International has become notorious for aggressively dismissing health concerns, but on Oct. 12, the company released a training bulletin recommending that officers avoid chest and head shots when possible. Three days later, however, Rick Guibault, vice president of training, said the change had little to do with safety and that the company would continue supporting its customers in lawsuits no matter where the Taser hits.

With no codified rules in place for Taser deployment, police have used it liberally — on children and the elderly, drug addicts and the mentally ill. Around 850,000 criminal suspects have been Tasered in the field, according to the company.

In 2007, the United Nations likened Taser use to torture. That same year the catch phrase “Don’t tase me, bro,” shouted by a student being Tasered by campus police, won a first place among Time magazine’s Top 10 T-shirt Worthy Slogans.

“Using the Taser weapon feels benign,” said Dalia Hashad, director of Amnesty International USA’s Domestic Human Rights Program. “Taser International is very fond of saying that getting shocked with a Taser is similar to receiving a static electricity shock from rubbing your feet on the carpet and then touching the doorknob. It’s that mentality that allows police officers to use the Taser weapon where they would never dream of using a billy club.”

“Unfortunately, there are hundreds of people who never got up again,” she said.

The Body Electric, and Then Some

The Tasers used by law enforcement look like play guns. Instead of a normal muzzle, the plastic weapon has two small cartridge doors. Pull the trigger and the doors pop open and two barbed metal darts, propelled by compressed nitrogen, fly out and lodge in the skin or clothes of the target. The darts are attached to the gun by thin electrical wires that draw electricity from a couple of AA batteries. Once in the body, they set up an electric circuit. The Taser’s high voltage — 50,000 volts, compared to the 110 volts of a light socket — makes charged particles flow readily through the skin, from dart to dart. The current is about 270 times smaller than that flowing in a Christmas-tree bulb, but it’s more than enough to hijack the delicate motor nerves that control our muscles.

At each pull of the trigger, the gun fires a rapid series of electric pulses that cycle for five seconds. As electricity courses down the motor nerves, it overrides the weaker signals from the brain and causes violent contractions in the muscle groups around the darts. The contractions are so powerful that, in rare instances, they can cause sprains or even fractures.

The overwhelming pain has long since placed electricity high in the torture arsenal. Later, it dawned on law enforcement that electricity would also make for a handy compliance tool. In 1969, riot-control expert Colonel Rex Applegate wrote in “Riot Control: materiel and techniques” that police could use the shock baton, essentially an electric cattle prod, to “handle and move, with a minimum of force, drunks of both sexes, teenagers, alcoholics, derelicts, etc.” The modern Taser goes one step further. Incapacitating the muscles, it freezes the target to the spot, allowing police to disarm and handcuff the suspect.

The Heart of the Matter

Studies From the Battlefield

Taser advocates who claim the weapon is safe often cite a 2009 study funded by the U.S. Department of Justice that tracked Taser deployments in six law enforcement agencies. In three years, police Tasered 1,201 suspects. All but five had only mild injuries. Two injured their heads severely when falling, and one had a rare case of muscle breakdown, which couldn’t be linked conclusively to the Taser. The deaths of two others, a cocaine addict and a mentally ill person, were judged to be unrelated to the Tasers. Those statistics make Tasers the safer alternative to other means of force — tackling, baton strikes or a canine unit — according to Steve Tuttle of Taser International. “That’s where the context is completely lost by our critics,” he said.

But the number of incidents in that study may have been too small to show the real risks. Earlier this year, cardiologist Zian Tseng of the University of California, San Francisco, published an analysis of sudden deaths in 50 police departments around California. Before Taser deployment, there had been roughly one sudden death a year per 100,000 arrests. After Tasers were put into use, that number rose to almost six deaths. “We’re not talking about some huge epidemic,” said Tseng. “But by the same token, because they’re so rare, not that much of an increase in absolute numbers becomes a six-fold increase.”

Later, the number of sudden deaths went back to normal — perhaps, the researchers speculate, because police departments recognized that Tasers “have real dangers and then adjusted the techniques and policies.”

The organization found 334 deaths in the U.S. following Taser deployments between 2001 and 2008 (according to Taser International, around 850,000 suspects have been Tasered in the field). In 37 of the 98 autopsy reports that Amnesty International was able to obtain, medical examiners listed Tasers as a cause or contributory factor. Many people had been Tasered multiple times, often by several officers simultaneously, and for periods extending up toward a minute. Most also had some sort of vulnerability. “They’re not the typical 170-pound, healthy male on whom a lot of the volunteer studies have been done,” said Dalia Hashad of Amnesty International. “It’s people who are older, people who are on drugs, people who have some sort of ailment, people with mental illness.”

Taser shocks cause most people to fall, which is why it should have come as no surprise when Morales toppled from the ledge.

Even on the ground, there is potential for skull fractures, concussions and intracranial bleeding, which Steve Tuttle of Taser International openly acknowledges. But apart from those obvious risks, experts are still debating the health effects of stun guns.

Several human lab studies, the majority funded by Taser International, suggest Tasers do not cause serious harm when used on healthy police officers for between 5 and 15 seconds. But lab settings are a far cry from the harsh realities on the street, critics say (see box for studies from the field). Arrestees are often agitated, on drugs or in poor health. Repeated electric shocks might be too much for their bodies to handle.

Amnesty International’s December report detailed the circumstances of 334 deaths following Taser episodes in the United States. When autopsy reports could be obtained, the most common cause of death was heart failure. The heart is a muscle, and just like skeletal muscles it operates on electric impulses and can be stopped by electricity.

Zian Tseng, a cardiac electrophysiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, is an expert at stopping hearts. He implants defibrillators into people with heart disease. Should the heart go into deadly overdrive, known as ventricular fibrillation, the electronic device jolts it back to its normal rhythm.

Before patching up his patients, Tseng checks the defibrillator by giving a well-timed electric shock to the heart, launching it into ventricular fibrillation. According to Tseng, the Taser could, in rare instances, have the same effect if placed over the heart.

“I firmly believe that used improperly, without proper technique and without proper safety measures in place, they can cause risk of sudden death,” he said.

The only direct evidence that Tasers can hijack the heart, published in 2007, came from the pacemaker of a 53-year-old prisoner. “He was running from his jailers and so violent and out of control that not only was he Tasered many times, he had all these dog bites,” said Leslie Saxon, chief of the cardiovascular medicine unit at the University of Southern California University Hospital.

A week later, he started complaining about chest pains. Saxon downloaded the memory of his pacemaker which revealed that his heart beat had synced up with each Taser pulse. For over 5 seconds, his heart beat 15 times per second, about five times faster than during vigorous exercise.

“In the same way, if you stuck a fork in a light socket, you could induce a very bad heart rhythm and you could die,” Saxon said. “It will cause the heart to go really fast, and because it’s going so fast it can’t pump enough blood out.”

But Tasers conduct much less energy than light sockets, and when the chest pains went away, the man was fine.

Still, the fact remains that the Taser hijacked his heart. Whether this could happen to people without pacemakers is unclear, Saxon said, because the metal in the pacemaker might have shunted the current through the heart. In fact, heart problems don’t appear to be a big problem for Tasers, she said. A few studies in pigs have found that they can indeed stop the heart, but several others have found that the energy delivered by Tasers — about a thousandth of that of a defibrillator — is below the threshold for capturing the heart.

“The current is simply too small to hurt you,” electrical engineer Mark Kroll wrote in an e-mail. Kroll, who is on Taser International’s board of directors, also noted that Tasers have been used on more than 1.6 million humans — suspects in the field as well as police volunteers — and have “demonstrated an impressive safety record.”

Cardiac electrophysiologist Mark Link of New England Medical Center agrees that Tasers do not cause instantaneous deaths from cardiac arrest. “That was the original theory,” he said. “I think that has been debunked.” But he is concerned that the shock and pain Tasers inflict may cause epinephrine, the body’s primary stress hormone, to surge dangerously. That, in turn, could increase the risk of heart failure minutes or hours later.

Doctors have also started worrying about the other big electric organ in our body: the brain. Earlier this year, Canadian neurologists published the first case report of a seizure triggered by a Taser shot in a healthy person. Two officers were chasing a suspected robber on foot, and one of them fired his Taser, accidentally hitting his colleague in the back of the head.

The officer lost consciousness and fell to the ground. His eyes rolled up into his head and his muscles stiffened. Then his limbs began jerking and froth gathered at his mouth. The episode lasted about a minute, and after several more minutes he gradually came around. He had a bad headache and couldn’t remember what had just happened.

This is how a typical epileptic seizure develops, but the officer did not have epilepsy. Richard Wennberg, a neurologist and epilepsy specialist at the University of Toronto who examined the officer after the episode, is convinced that the Taser seized control of the nerve cells in the officer’s brain. It caused them to fire in a fast, rhythmic pattern that triggered the seizure, much as electroshock therapy would.

While the officer hasn’t had more seizures, he still experiences anxiety, difficulty concentrating and headaches — symptoms likely due to the concussion from the fall — and is now on antidepressants.

“If it became in fashion to aim the Taser at people’s heads, in some sort of dystopian future, I think this would be happening all the time,” Wennberg said.

Both seizure and heart failure following Taser discharges are rare. Most of the fatalities in Amnesty International’s report had underlying cardiovascular disease, and proving these people wouldn’t have died during a struggle without being Tasered is impossible. This is reflected in the verdicts of several lawsuits brought against Taser International. Until June 7, 2008, when a California jury found Tasers to be 15 percent responsible for a cardiac arrest, the company had never been defeated in a product-liability claim, according to Bloomberg.

“The ideal study would be, you randomize a city and say half the police use Tasers and half do not, and then you compare that over five years,” Link said. “And maybe it is time for something like that, because there is so much controversy about the use of these devices.”

Use and Abuse

Morales was buried on Oct. 2, 2008. Just hours before the funeral, Lt. Pigott, who had been in charge at the scene of Morales’ death, went to the locker room at his headquarters in Brooklyn. He was deeply distraught. Ordering his officer to use a Taser had violated NYPD’s guidelines, which specify that the weapon, if possible, should not be used when it can cause a fall from an elevated position.

As a result, Pigott had been demoted to a desk job and stripped of his gun and badge. In the locker room, he found the handgun of another officer and shot himself in the head.

“There was no need to Taser that man on the ledge. What harm was he causing? He was on a friggin’ ledge,” said spokeswoman Lisa Ortega, who knows Morales’ family. “He could have easily been talked down. He was just disoriented.”

Morales’ case is hardly the only one to attract criticism. There are examples of police officers Tasering elderly people with dementia, children as young as 7 years old, and people who passively resist arrest, for instance by remaining limp. While the NYPD declined to comment, a 2005 study from the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington, D.C.-based organization of police executives, found that most of the 74 police departments surveyed permit Taser deployment on all age groups, and 30 percent accept use on passive resisters.

But such practices don’t pass muster with human-rights organizations. “Police officers are routinely misled into thinking that Taser weapons are a magic remedy to ending a confrontational situation,” said Amnesty International’s Hashad. In about 90 percent of the deaths the group investigated, the suspects were unarmed.

“Does it really make sense to be out there using the weapon in many situations where there are alternatives?” Hashad asks. “When we don’t really know what the impact on the individual is? Is that really a risk we’re going to take?”

Still, many law enforcement agencies report that Tasers are the best way to prevent violent escalations. Although Taser International’s deployment database has been criticized for relying on voluntary reporting involving incentive schemes, a recent study from the Canadian Police Research Centre [pdf], a publicly funded organization in Ottawa, found that stun guns were in fact less injurious than traditional means of force, such as the baton.

“Imagine if my kids get into drugs five years from now,” said Tuttle of Taser International. “Would I accept for an officer to strike my son with a baton? God no. But if my kid got hit by a Taser, I’m not happy, but I’m damn thankful that it wasn’t a baton or a dog bite or a bean bag. It could disfigure them, scar them, or do some permanent damage.”

Political scientist Darius Rejali of Reed College, an internationally recognized torture expert, agrees that Tasers do have a place. “It’s pretty clear that these technologies have saved people’s lives,” he said.

But he added that we need to be extra careful around electrical weapons, because they leave few traces and are easy to abuse. “If Tasers left bloody marks every time you used them, there would be an immediate end to the use of them. The problem with electricity is that no one can tell how much pain a person is in.”

The Police Executive Research Forum in Washington, D.C. has issued guidelines for Taser use, but police departments are free to follow their own rules, which vary widely. And Taser International sees no reason for this to change.

“There are no national guidelines for baton strikes, pepper spray or even firearms,” Tuttle said. “Why would we only regulate one?”

Many deploy the weapon as the lowest level of force, before hands-on approaches and batons, and long before firearms. Although Taser International encourages these practices, it is clear that the free-floating standards have sparked much of the controversy about stun technology.

“I would prefer to be shot with a Taser than a handgun if that was the choice,” said Neil Davison, author of the book “‘Non-Lethal’ Weapons.” “But often that isn’t the choice.”

While waiting for better guidelines and more research, Tseng, the California cardiologist, has a simple recommendation for policemen using Tasers: “The antidote is easily available, and that’s the Automatic External Defibrillator, which is present at every airport, at every casino,” he said. “Put an AED in the trunk of your police car if you’re using the Taser.”

A defibrillator would not have helped Iman Morales, though. In February, his family sued New York City for wrongful death. The family’s lawyer told The New York Times they want “to make sure that policies and procedures are put into effect in the future so that Tasering cases are over with this case.”

The lawsuit appears to have had little impact so far, as binding national guidelines still don’t exist. Since the beginning of the year, 45 people have died in the U.S. after being Tasered by law enforcement, according to the blog Electronic Village. How many of these deaths were linked to the Taser is unclear, as is the number of lives saved by the technology.

At least one death bears an eerie resemblance to Morales’ case: On June 9, Brian Cardall, a 32-year-old graduate student, was driving with his wife and daughter in southern Utah when he had a bipolar episode. He exited the car, stripped off his clothes and starting shouting at traffic. Responding to a 911 call from Cardall’s wife, police arrived at the scene and shocked Cardall twice with a Taser. After the second deployment, Cardall stopped breathing and lost his pulse. He was dead.

Images: 1) Taser’s Steve Tuttle holds a X-26 Taser at the company’s plant in
Scottsdale, Arizona/Pat Shannahan. 2) Taser International/Pat Shannahan. 3) X-26 Tasers through their final cycle test called an electronic burn in. The taser is fired a repeatedly to make sure everything is working/Pat Shannahan.